Pat Zylius

Patricia Zylius lives Santa Cruz, California. She was a member of the pioneer class at UCSC and has lived here ever since, in the same house for the last thirty-seven years, where she raised two sons. She makes a living as a copyeditor. This is, in fact, an incurable syndrome. She gardens, practices tai chi, walks, and listens mostly to music written before 1750 and jazz. Her poems have appeared in the Porter Gulch Review , the Monterey Poetry Review , the Good Times , and caesura .

Witness

My brother Steven sits at the table,
the big dictionary under him.
Humming, he stirs gravy
into the shape of a goose.
Below the thatch of pale hair
his blue eyes look down at the plate. He pushes
a few peas around with his Mickey Mouse spoon.

Eat your dinner, my father demands.
Steven considers him, his blond eyebrows rising,
his puffy mouth in a round O.
He pokes a bit of meatloaf and sighs.
Though the rest of us are grown now,
we say nothing, hiding
in our bunker of silence.

Eeeeat!
my father erupts again,
as though the command was a stick
he could use to shove food
down the child’s gullet.
He does not yell as loud as he can,
though I can tell he wants to,
the words struggling
against fingers of self-control
wrapped around his throat.

The air feels too dangerous
to breathe. I can hardly stand
to look at anyone. For years we all swallowed
orders by the forkful, survived
by choking down objections.
Steven, the raw recruit,
is on his own. Tears pool,
and he begins to whimper, but he just sits
with his spoon clenched in his fist.

This is my father’s late
last chance to make
a child in his own image.
His roars fly past our heads
and splatter like full plates
flung against the wall.